EXPERIMENTS AT 3 BILLION A.M. surprised me from beginning to end. While it took me a while to get through its massive length (and the few head-scratchers), the majority of this fine collection is quite impressive, especially coming from an author I knew nothing about. Recommended.

Nick Cato – The Horror Fiction Review [link dead]

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Next came a spectacular review of Ultrameta, which even went so far as to compare it with Pynchon and Beckett:

On the most surface level you can see a story of a man living many lives, but like Thomas Pynchon, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, what you see on the surface is but a reflection of the immensity which is hidden beneath. Really, I don’t throw those names around lightly; I really was that impressed with the novel, this represents a new form of literature for a new century.

If the review appears short then maybe a new form of criticism needs to be employed, for my part I was just blown away. There are few book which clash imagery and ideas in such a perfect union as Ultrameta. If this isn’t a modern classic, then there is little justice in the world, which would be an irony considering the content of the book.

What the Giants Are Saying is an unnerving, edgy work. It asks the inevitable question, what is art? And then explores the issue in a supremely visceral and unflinching manner. Yes, it has become acceptable (though controversial still) to manipulate inanimate tissue, such as Damian Hurst’s sharks and sheep, or Dr. Gunther von Hagens’ corpse sculptures, but to carve and stitch your art onto living flesh, to mutilate the breathing, that is another matter, or is it? After all, who owns our flesh? We accept the tattoo, the piercing, gender change (whether medically necessary or simply a need), even genital mutilation—weren’t the Castratos of a bygone age mutilated in the name of musical art—so who is to say where it ends, what is acceptable and what is extreme, if not even criminal?

What the Giants Are Saying is a bold work, it eschews story-telling conventions, it is readable, but difficult. It gives no easy answers or comfortable conclusions. It asks mote questions than it answers. It is horror, and then it isn’t, not in the conventional sense anyway, it is that rare and wonderful thing, an unclassifiable work. Even the beautiful, striking and disturbing cover is ostensibly horror, but then, on closer examination probably not.

Grimwood ended his review with some remarks about Eibonvale Press in general:

David Rix is, as I understand it, the man behind the remarkable and adventurous Eibonvale Press, publishers of the off-beat and different. With his own book he has certainly flown the Eibonvale flag and all power to him for stepping off the main road into wilder, more difficult country.

Thanks to everyone concerned for those new reviews! All three of you made me very happy!